So the RTS Craft and Design awards, whose nominations we brought you last month, have been announced. And despite being nominated in multiple categories, the craftsmen and women of Doctor Who missed out on any gongs.
All, that is, apart from Neill Gorton — who, with his Chesham-based Millennium FX team, were up for three awards. In the end, he won (with Vanessa White) for his work on The Catherine Tate Christmas Show, and for BBC Three’s Bodies. According to the RTS:
The jury commented that multi-character sketch comedy often presents as big a challenge for the designer as it does for the performers. Tonight’s winner has allowed the same actress to portray a teenage school girl, a grandmother and an ageing gay man together with a wide range of characters in between.
In addition, the team won the special award for Design & Craft Innovation, for which their entire oeuvre was considered — including, of course, his work for the good Doctor:
Doctor Who is a relentless machine, as a show it eats people’s creativity - in the last three years we have pushed this team to their limits and they have never let us down. The Doctor Who producers tell us that they are delighted that this talented, hardworking genius of a team are being recognised tonight.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Gorton and the team deserve their accolade — when I described him in the nominations post as “the hardest working man in make-up”, it was with good cause. Yet it seems that, for the time being at least, the phenomenal work of the production design, costume and make-up teams, led by Ed Thomas, Louise Page and Sheelagh Wells respectively, have yet to receive the awards recognition they deserve. To my mind, even when the TV scripts have not necessarily been as strong as they could be, the episodes never fail to be visually stunning. It can’t be easy to do that on a limited budget, and with a new time period every week.
That’s not to denigrate any of the winners, of course (and you can find the full, deserving list at the RTS website).
